EU and U.S. negotiators are rushing to conclude a transatlantic trade pact before President Barack Obama leaves office, but the window of opportunity is ready to close: If there’s no result by early next year, the deal risks being delayed another two or three years — or completely falling apart.

Concern is growing that if negotiations for a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) are not completed before 2017, they will get bogged down in the toxic mixture of a change of administration in the U.S. and elections in two major EU countries — France and Germany — where Euroskeptics and others will surely exploit public mistrust of the deal in their campaigns.

An April 24 meeting at the Hannover Messe trade fair between Obama, U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and EU Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmström is being billed as the “last chance” to wrap up the deal before the White House changes hands.

One day later in New York City, the 13th round of TTIP negotiations will start with what one European Commission source called “intensified engagement” from both sides of the Atlantic.

If you really want this, it needs to be completed during this (U.S.) presidency — John Emerson

“If you really want this, it needs to be completed during this (U.S.) presidency,” said John Emerson, the U.S. ambassador to Germany, who told POLITICO that whoever wins America’s election in November will “want to put their impact” on the TTIP talks. “The other issue is, it isn’t just the American election.… You get into the French elections and then the German election. Those push the process out.”

Merkel raised the pressure last week. The chancellor, together with heads of international economic organizations like the World Trade Organization, International Money Found and World Bank, issued a joint statement that they “expect significant progress in the negotiations on a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership in 2016.”

In the U.S., Republican and Democratic presidential candidates, from Donald Trump and to Ted Cruz to Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, have been critical of Obama’s trade agenda. Although their criticism has so far focused on a different trade deal, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), there are concerns that the election campaign is already hampering progress in the TTIP talks.

“The Americans are using their presidential elections to not move on any topics that are sensitive for them,” said Luisa Santos, director for international relations at BusinessEurope, the Continent’s major business lobby. “But we knew from the start this would come up. It’s not fair to hide behind an election now.”

If the trade talks do slip beyond this year, they could not realistically be expected to conclude before 2018 or 2019, according to Hosuk Lee-Makiyama, director of European Centre for International Political Economy (ECIPE) and a regular consultant on trade issues for governments and international bodies like the World Trade Organization.

“Whoever will be the next [U.S.] president, we’re looking deep into 2017 before they come to bother about trade,” said Lee-Makiyama, who took a dim view of the chances of reaching a deal this year.

“It’s not difficult, it’s simply impossible,” he said.

Threat to democracy

Too many of the deal’s 24 chapters are still under debate, even some of the least controversial ones, Lee-Makiyama said. “We are still having negotiations on rudimentary issues like agriculture or services, which are normally solved after four or five rounds.”

Erik Paulsen, a Republican member of the U.S. Congress, argued for patience. “Trade negotiations are always tough,” he said. “It takes time. We need to push for concluding this year, but we also need to aim high. If we can’t make it this year, it’s better to take our time.”

The European Commission also thinks that “substance comes before speed,” according to a spokesperson. “We are committed to making as much progress as possible in 2016,” the spokesperson said, but the aim is to secure “an ambitious and balanced deal.”

Even if the next U.S. president chose to push for TTIP in 2017, the European political landscape next year is laced with risk: French voters will head to the polls twice, with presidential elections expected in late April or early May and parliamentary elections scheduled for June. In Germany, federal elections for the Bundestag, which then elects the chancellor, will be held sometime in fall 2017.

Campaigning French and German politicians will be more reluctant than ever to commit to meaningful negotiations, which always take place behind closed doors, for fear of drawing criticism they’ve ceded ground on key issues for their constituents.

“Every TTIP round attracts the attention of critics, we know that,” a senior EU official said. “We try to be as transparent as possible, but such negotiations always include some element of secrecy.”

German Vice Chancellor and Economy and Energy Minister Sigmar Gabriel (SPD) arrives to open the TTIP Reading Room at the federal economy ministry on January 28, 2016 in Berlin, Germany. The reading room was established to help educate parliamentarians and keep them up-to-date on the issue Adam Berry/Getty Images

Germany, however, is the heartland of TTIP skepticism: Only 27 percent of Germans support the deal, compared to an EU average of 53 percent, according to an EU-wide Eurobarometer survey conducted last year.

“Germans are not against trade in general, but they oppose restrictions imposed by TTIP that could infringe on democracy,” said Sven Giegold, a German MEP from the Greens party, which last month notched a victory over Merkel’s Christian Democrats in a regional election in Baden-Württemberg, one of the wealthiest German states.

“We see the deal in its current state as a risk to our society’s standards,” Giegold said. “If they don’t change the approach, which frankly I can’t see at the moment, this will become an issue in the German elections as well as in other European countries.”

At the other end of the political spectrum, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) — which had a strong showing in all three state elections last month and threatens to get its first seats in the national parliament next year — is highly critical of Merkel and her Social Democrat economy minister, Sigmar Gabriel, for going “too far” in the closed-door TTIP negotiations.

“Of course we will make it an issue in our election campaign,” said Marcus Pretzell, one of the AfD’s two MEPs.

Reduced to silence

In France, the public has not paid much attention to the TTIP negotiations. But that is about to change, said Emmanuel Maurel, a French Socialist MEP, adding that the trade talks could become a headache for President François Hollande should he decide to publicly endorse them during the election campaign.

“It’s going to become a big issue in France, that’s for sure,” Maurel said.

Last week, 60 French parliamentarians signed an open letter in Le Monde criticizing the lack of transparency in the TTIP talks and vowing that they will not permit the EU to “reduce the French parliament to silence.”

French Foreign Trade Minister Matthias Fekl has taken a step back from TTIP, calling on the U.S. to agree to a more transparent negotiation process and asking Washington to endorse Europe’s proposal to create a court to resolve disputes between U.S. investors and European governments. Otherwise, said Fekl, “the question is why we’re still negotiating.”

In France, too, resistance comes from both ends of the political spectrum, with Marine Le Pen’s National Front promising to try to use the trade talks to unseat Socialist president Hollande in 2017.

“We will definitely raise this issue in our election campaign,” said Philippe Murer, Le Pen’s economic adviser. “It is very important to us.”

Canadian style

Considering the political challenges, it’s no surprise that talk of a “TTIP-lite” continues to circulate despite official rejections of a less ambitious target, according to lawmakers like Jürgen Hardt, coordinator for transatlantic cooperation in the German foreign ministry, who is from Merkel’s CDU.

TTIP-lite would focus on less controversial issues and skip more complex ones, such as public procurement, where Brussels wants the U.S. to open tenders to European companies. Washington’s first draft on the issue last month was far from what the EU had hoped for, but an official from the U.S. trade representative said there would be no new offer on the table.

Other issues stalling progress are the protection of European food names, common regulation on financial services, and the Commission’s proposal to deal with investment disputes through an investor court that would include an appeal mechanism.

However, given the importance of such issues to European negotiators, the TTIP-lite proposal is unlikely to prosper. “A TTIP lite will never get the approval of the Parliament,” said the centre-left German MEP Bernd Lange.

Another option would be to follow the example of the recently concluded EU-Canada trade talks, said Cécile Toubeau, a trade policy analyst from the Brussels-based NGO Transport and Environment. In the EU-Canada deal, known by the acronym CETA (Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement), negotiations were officially finalized in 2014, but both sides used a legal review phase to continue adding stealthy changes to the arrangement.

Santos from BusinessEurope said she expects an overall political agreement by the end of the year, which would point the direction in which each side wants to go. “The negotiators would then only need to sort out the technical details,” she said.

For Jürgen Hardt in Berlin, the coming round of talks in New York will need to show substantial progress if there is any hope of agreement by the end of 2016.

“That will be a difficult task, but we can still make it if political will is there,” said the German politician.

Mike

emmma

TTIP is a very dangerous project that will eventually kill democracy and people’s power. Look who si actually at the meeting: Merkel, Obama, high EU bureaucrats and IMF?! Who is representing other Nations that will need to accept this deal? The EU Commission, as it has the competence in trade issues unlike the EU members states, will come to EU countries and say: now you need to accept it, no negotiations. We all need to be worried when our trade future and economy determine people like IMF and EU bureaucrats, who represent the strongest states, and the interest of their private sector. Shame!

Posted on 4/11/16 | 10:20 AM CET

George

Politico should start worrynig a little bit. The comments reveal that most of its readers are idiots. Let’s just hope that this concerns the majority of those who care to comment and not the readers in general.

Posted on 4/11/16 | 11:13 AM CET

Mike

@George

Since you refer to comments in plural -and unless you would be referring to your own comment- I take it you include mine.
Now, could someone in the know, as you claim to be, please explain to us ‘idiots’ how TTIP will not privatize healthcare and, also, how it would stop EU citizens subsiding the healthcare of Eurocrats?

The really big challenge with TTIP is that there has been no agreement on how to regulate standards. Everyone knows that technical barriers are the real brake on free trade – but unless and until there is some proper democratic body with judicial oversight on how these standards are created and enforced there will always be resistance to TTIP. Europeans are right to be worried. In many – but not all instances of course – US standards are shoddy and driven by corporate interests not the public good. Of particular concern are food standards, agricultural standards and environmental standards.